REPORTS FROM THE RIP: One engine tied behind my back.

All was going well till 60 miles out of Samana Dominican Republic..............................

We departed the Turks last Tuesday. Once again we were trying to stay south of the cold front that has recently hammered the US. We left out of Blue Haven Marina at 4 am and even if we had rough seas, we should have made Samana DR by 4 pm. We had 3-4 foot seas and 10-15 knot winds on our nose as we headed southeast. That would have been ok but we also still had that lingering north swell. The north swell pushing straight into the wind made for a sloppy sea. At about 1:30 in the afternoon, I slowed the boat so that everyone could take a bathroom rest. As I did, Matt went into the engineroom to do a check and yelled quickly to shut down the starboard engine. We had fuel all over the engineroom. After some investigating We determined that we had a cracked fuel line. The line that cracked is not a common break so we had no parts to replace it. The crack allowed the fuel under 90 pounds of pressure to atomize and it had everything in the engineroom coated with deisel. We are fortunate that Matt caught it. If he had not gone down there when he did, the fuel could have cooked off on a turbo and started a fire. We were very fortunate. Down to one engine we had to slug our way for the next 6 hours to the port of Samana. The sun set as we came around Cabo Cabrone. We were all already on high alert as we had seen numerous whales before the sun set. As we came around Cabo Cabrone, The seas jacked up in the currents that push thru that area and made it very rough. We could smell the whales and saw many of them spout as we plowed along. We even had one surface 10 feet off the side of the boat We made our way through the whales without incident and tied up safely at Puerto Bahi Samana marina. Capt Barb was invaluable again in making the crossing.

The next morning I got word that the Parts were going to be in Tampa in time for My buddys Kurt and Tyler to pick them up before they flew into the DR on the 20th. With that off of my mind I rechecked the weather. The predicted north swell had been switched to the north east. and was going to build in the next two days. I decided to Run on one engine to Cap Cana and sit there till my friends arrived with the parts.

The trip from Samana to Cap Cana Was a breeze. It was very calm and pretty. We saw so many hump back whales. I have been thru there many times but have never seen so many whales. We saw full grown hump back whales leaping all the way out of the water. If there are any boats headed to the DR in the next couple weeks, Beware!. We were only doing 9-10 knots and almost hit a few of them. Im told that 85 percent of the Hump back whales in the atlantic, winter in the Dominican Republic.

Yesterday we left out of Cap Cana and slowly made our way to Casa De Campo with one engine still tied behind our back. It was very pretty and we made it into Casa De Campo with out incident.

It was good to get back and see Vilma, Jesmine and Jose. They are so awesome and make us all feel so welcome.

With the part in hand this morning Matt and I fixed our fuel leak and have the engine back up and running. I have to say thanks to Joe Woods and Ronny Stewart at Cat Ringpower for expediting our parts . Thanks to Mike Galati for always answering your phone when I call after-hours.

Tomorrow we will get all the marlin gear and tackle out. Then Monday I think we are going to go see if we can catch a couple blue ones.

Some of the pics below are from last weeks blog but the pics did not go thru.